Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 810: The Empty Average Edition

Episode Date: February 3, 2016

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about Howie Kendrick’s contract, Scott Boras and the CBA, how teams hire analysts, young MVPs, and more.

I've been thinking I'm working too hard, but I've got something to show. Stay down and keep playing this, such a bad, disabled guy. Stay down and keep playing this, I don't wanna be like this Hello and welcome to episode 810 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, presented by The Play Index at BaseballReference.com. I am Ben Lindberg of FiveThirtyEight, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Prospectus.

Hello. Hello. So we're doing some emails today. Anything you want to talk about before we get there? Nope. All right, then. Let me start with a question from Corey in Franklin, Tennessee. And his email was subject-lined Howie.

And the question was, so does this mean that Howie Kendrick's agent is really bad? And by this, he means Howie Kendrick's contract, which is with the Dodgers for two years and $20 million guaranteed. So does that mean that his agent is really bad? And he turned down a qualifying offer, by the way. So he rejected a one-year $15.8 million contract and ended up signing two and 20. Well, so there's two questions, I guess, or two questions that you might ask about his agent. One is if this contract is a bad contract. The other is whether the qualifying offer should have been accepted knowing that this was going to be the contract. And I don't know, it's a little light for sure to answer the first question,

a little lighter than people. Do we know what Bowden suggested he would get? I can find out. He predicted three and 45. Three and 45. So, so, you know, clearly that's a lot lower. Yeah. I think that it's, it's not absurdly low. I think it's somewhat low, but you, sometimes you get to this point in the off season and you have to take a lower deal. I mean, I don't think that you can necessarily say that it was a bad decision to take this deal because there's no guarantee, especially this late in the season, in the offseason, that there's anything better coming down the line. There might have been something better before, but it's hard to know how much you should, how, well, whether it was smart to kind of gamble on something. If you, if you're, you're never going to necessarily know that you're going to get the best offer that is possible.

And you might have to turn down deals speculatively, and then you might get stuck with something worse. I mean, it sucks for Howie because he's only one guy. I think you can definitely argue that Howie Kendrick gets less than he probably is worth. But an agent is going to make dozens of deals in his career. It's hard to judge him on one because if he never has a mistake like this, or if he never ends up with something less like this, he might not be being aggressive enough in pursuing the promise of a bigger deal somewhere down the line. I think also for this to look like a really super sweet deal,

you have to believe that Howie Kendrick has defensive value. And that's not a completely consensus viewpoint. I think that there were people who thought that his, people within the Angels who thought that his defense was on a downward slope even before he left the Angels, and then it plummeted, at least according to defensive runs saved, it plummeted in his first year with the Dodgers, and you wouldn't expect it to go up. He also missed time for the second time in three years. He's a 32-year-old second baseman, and we know they don't age that well. He's not a super athletic guy. And you could

kind of imagine that he's not necessarily going to be a, well, not just that he's not going to be a good second baseman going forward, but that he could be a very bad second baseman going forward. And there's not a lot of places for a bad second baseman to go. So, you know, I wouldn't surprise like I, it seems low, but it wouldn't, it also wouldn't surprise me if at the end of two years, we looked back and went, oh, so he was, he really was worth three wins over those two years. That seems like a, a not implausible. Let me see what we project him for. But that seems like a, know not a it's not a it's not a completely mind-bogglingly low deal in my opinion is it in yours we project him to be we project him to be

worth four wins over the next two years so yeah and right so that would be something like it you'd expect like 30 million for that yeah he's a league average player, almost exactly, I think, according to just about every projection system. So if he's a two wins above replacement guy and wins are going for whatever they're going for, seven or eight or something million, then yeah, you would expect him to get, on a two-year deal, you'd expect him to get, this is like two-thirds as big as the contract he should get by Wins above replacement.

So who else got a contract in this range? By the way, he's the same age and plays the same position that Omar Infante did when he hit free agency and signed with the Royals. that Omar Infante did when he hit free agency and signed with the Royals. And he also signed a deal that was much lower than his projected war was going to be over that time period. And we thought that was a great bargain at the time. And we applauded the Royals for it. And, you know, he's only one case. He hasn't lived up to even that lower deal. But it was something of a comparable deal. It was longer, but also for a fairly low average annual value. It was four years and $30 million. And so based on that, maybe anecdotally between those two, and maybe you can think of some others, I think that maybe second baseman at that age, probably, I feel like, I shouldn't say probably because I haven't looked,

but anecdotally, I've kind of felt like those are players who get less than their projected war suggests, which maybe tells you that they're an undervalued resource, or maybe it tells you that there's something in the positional adjustments, particularly for players at that age, that there's something in the positional adjustments, particularly for players at that age, uh, when, uh, movement on the defensive spectrum,

uh, becomes a bit more common, a bit more necessary. And for a second baseman, perhaps a bit more of a penalty than at other positions, uh, that teams just don't really quite buy, um,

the, the projected wars for that kind of a player. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a lot lower than I would have expected. And I suppose then you would have expected because we both drafted Jim Bowden's predictions. And he said 345 and neither of us took the under on that as something we wanted to bet on at the beginning of the season. So it's a lot lower than I would have thought. I didn't, you know,

sit down and look at all the possible landing places for a second baseman and whether there was a market for him. And maybe there wasn't really. Then again, I mean, if Daniel Murphy gets three years and 37 and a half, which would you rather have? They both had qualifying offers. Are they comparable? Are they close if you compare them? Yeah, I'd rather have Kendrick. I think I'd rather have Kendrick, but it's fairly close. Yeah.

The thing about Murphy is that I would rather have Murphy playing third and I would rather have Howie Kendrick playing second. And it seems maybe more likely that you're going to get Daniel Murphy playing third for the next three years or for a lot of the next three years. And it seems more likely that you're going to have Howie Kendrick stuck at second for the next two years. And so I think I would rather have probably Howie Kendrick, but it's close, and I'm not totally confident in that position. Yeah. And the other deals in this range that were

signed this offseason, Mike Pelfrey got two years and 16 million. Asdrubal Cab Estrada got two years in 26 million. So, you know, I mean, if Murphy gets 37.5 and Astruble Cabrera gets essentially the same as Kendrick, I mean, I would rather have Kendrick than these players probably. I think he probably deserves more money than those players. So the fact that he didn't get it, I don't know. Would I be pleased with my agent if I were Howie Kendrick and I got two years and $20 million? Probably not, except I would know everything. So I would know whether there had been a bigger offer that had been rejected at some point. And obviously that's a big part of this. I guess you could say that if there never

was a bigger offer than this, that might also be on the agent in a sense that maybe he didn't agent enough. He didn't reach out to enough people. He didn't plug hard enough. He didn't go over the GM's head and talk to the owner, whatever it is that aggressive agents do to create markets for their client or public relations or whatever it is, you could maybe blame him for that offer not materializing. So yeah, I think that I probably have maybe talked myself into thinking that this is closer to his market value than it is. Now that I think about it, if you'd asked me three months ago, if you'd put all these

contracts in front of me three months ago and said, which one do you want? I'd probably take Howie's over almost any free agent signed, maybe over any free agent signed his offseason. So that suggests that, in fact, I'm underselling it. It is a good deal. It is a very good deal. And it isn't enough for Howie Kendrick.

Right. So then the question is, when a player doesn't get as much as we think he should, is that a sign that his agent is bad? By the way, his other clients, Howie Kendrick's agent's other clients, include Torrey Hunter, who did extremely well for himself and pretty much always got more than we thought he should. Justin Upton, who I think did well for himself this offseason. Did fine.

And BJ Upton, who got that big deal from the Braves five years ago. So there's not a – and Latroy Hawkins is one I don't have any idea whether. Latroy Hawkins has been fairly compensated in his career. But there's not a – I wouldn't run the guy out of the game based on this. Okay, so as to the qualifying offer, he was not one of the guys that I thought should have taken the qualifying offer.

So it's hard for me to... I guess it's hard for me to then knock him for that. And I don't... Again, Daniel Murphy accepted the qualifying offer and it didn't seem to hurt him at all. Did Daniel Murphy get a qualifying offer? He did, yeah.

Okay, yeah, and didn't seem to hurt him at all. And so, I guess, yeah, the crime is getting this deal after all. Take back everything I said. I think that he was probably right to turn down the qualifying offer. I think that he was probably right to turn down the qualifying offer. It's surprising that he signed for this low to me and not a great deal and maybe not enough to say that his agent is to blame. It's always hard to know. You ask us these questions that involve a lot of unknowns.

Yeah. And not only a lot of unknowns, but sample sizes of one. It's hard to even necessarily draw conclusions. I mean, all sorts of things can happen that can depress a guy's value one time, especially once it gets to February. That's the balance between signing early in the offseason and signing late seems to be the biggest challenge for teams. It's almost like the player's equivalent of using your best reliever in leverage.

You want to use him in good leverage, but you don't know if there's a better leverage situation coming down the road, down the line in the same game. And so for the player, you don't want to get stuck in February, and you also don't want to get too aggressive because sometimes the best deals come after you wait. It's hard to say. Yeah.

Very hard to say. Very hard to say. Very hard. Very difficult to say. Question from... Joel hanrahan was one of his clients do we have an opinion about joel hanrahan and how he's been handled i say yes it's fine i bet he's should we guess joel hanrahan's career earnings yeah let's do that okay joel hanrahan i'll go I can't remember whether he got a closer contract. I'll say he has earned $17 million. I'll say like $8.1.

Okay. $13.8. All right. That is almost the midpoint between us. $13.8 and it's actually, he's probably earned more than that. He got $13.8 through 2013 and he hasn't pitched since then uh and so i don't see his contracts after that but he might have actually gotten paid real money in 2014 as well i'm not sure all right question from robert i might be the last person to

realize this but reigning national league mvp bryce harper is nine months younger than reigning National League MVP Bryce Harper is nine months younger than reigning National League Rookie of the Year Chris Bryant. This fun fact got me thinking, how often is a league's Rookie of the Year been older than its MVP award recipient, and what has been the widest disparity between those two ages? So I looked this up with some help from BP's Rob McEwen, who just sent me a list of winners and ages. And this is not unprecedented. It isn't common, but it has happened 10 times in the past. So they've only been awarding a rookie of the year since 1947. So in that time, this is the 11th time that a MVP was younger than a rookie of the year in the same league in the same year. And on average, the MVP winner is a little more than five years older than the rookie of the year winner. The average rookie

of the year is 23.3 and the average MVP is 28.5. And those ages make perfect sense. I think the biggest disparity between the age of one or the other, one of the times was just a couple years ago. Mike Trout was 22 when he won the AL MVP award and Jose Abreu was 27 when he won the AL Rookie of the Year award. And the other time that there was a five year gap between them, and I didn't look to see whether it was slightly higher one year or the other, obviously it was. But the other time when there was a five-year gap was 1957 hank aaron was the nl mvp at age 23 and jack sandford was the nl rookie of the year at 28 so harper being slightly older than bryant is or bryant being slightly older older than Harper is not really that unusual happens I don't know every several years I wonder what Jack Sanford's story was I wonder if he like went to

Korea Jack Sanford served in the U.S. Army in 1955 and then didn't pitch until September of 56. Yep. Died in 2000. Can't call him. Nope. All right. Question from Andrew. With the upcoming CBA negotiations, would it behoove the players union to try to hire Scott Boris to negotiate the new CBA for them? Why or why not? So Scott Boris often weighs in on CBS or CBA issues. And, you know, he complains about draft pick compensation for free agents routinely. He complains about other things that depress spending by owners. And obviously he has a motive. He wants to get his clients the most money. But that overlaps with the motive of most

players, which is to make more money. And there are other considerations, but really it kind of just all comes down to money, whether it's immediate earnings or whether it's pension or whether it's other forms of compensation, it's all compensation in the end. So Scott Boris has proved himself effective at getting players more money. He also seems interested in these sort of league-wide issues, if only because it affects how much money he can get his clients. So why would you not want Scott Boris as the person leading your negotiations if you were a player? Is there any reason? I have no idea what skills are useful for these negotiations. as the person leading your negotiations if you were a player. Is there any reason? I have no idea what skills are useful for these negotiations.

Yeah. I mean, I imagine that it's different than any other negotiation and has similarities to any other negotiation as well. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what the tone of the conversation is. I don't know how much't know what the tone of the conversation is i don't know how much playing the or or um using the media or using kind of public relations tactics matter i don't know how much keeping a coalition is the key thing it seems to me that keeping a coalition might be a very significant thing or it might not be it seems like maybe having a relationship with your

the other person in the negotiation might be very important and it might not be. I honestly have no idea. Okay. Well, yeah. I mean, he obviously has a lot of experience with negotiation. That's what he does. And you're right. It might be different. You'd think there'd be a lot of overlap in that he is always representing a player and trying to get the player the best deal and talking to teams. In this case, he would be talking to essentially all teams at the same time represented by whoever is negotiating for the league. So maybe that's a little bit different. Well, and also talking to all teams at the same time, while also in a way actually talking to none. This is an instance where he is not talking to a person who is a baseball person. He's not talking to a person who is a baseball person.

He's not talking to a person who runs a team or who, you know, came up through the ranks for his, you know, either analytical or baseball background, but he's talking to another lawyer, basically. This is to some degree the least baseball negotiation in baseball. True. And I like, it's very clear that Scott Boris is exceptional at what he does, and I don't know why he's exceptional at that. I don't know if it's that he's that strong in one-on-one interactions. I don't know if it's that he understands the GM's mind better than anybody else.

I don't know if it's that he understands team needs better than anybody else or if he understands what makes a player special better than anybody else. I don't know if it's that he understands team needs better than anybody else, or if he understands what makes a player special better than anybody else. All of those things aren't necessarily applicable. They might also suggest an ability to think in a negotiation in a way that is flexible and powerful and to the situation. And so you could make the case maybe that he would be great doing, you know, you can make the case that he would be great in negotiating. I think if the answer to this is yes, he should, it would be for the same reasons that you should say that he should negotiate, you know, a fire union, a fire union's negotiations with, you know, the city of New York, right? Or that he should negotiate the purchase price of drone supplies from a manufacturer in China,

like that he should just negotiate all things all the time. I don't necessarily see a great overlap between what he does and the CBA, except in as much as he is a person with great gravitas in the industry and that might matter it might be that simply walking into a room and seeing scott boris across the table from you would have an effect and put him in a stronger position he's maybe maybe you see scott boris across the table and he's always got the big stack so that could be i'd be if i the players, I'd be perfectly happy if Scott Boris were negotiating for me. But I'm also, I don't know that I feel that way for any reason other than a general admiration for his ability to do things. Yeah.

I mean, in the usual negotiation he has, he is talking to a baseball person, at least initially. And then it seems like part of his brilliance is that he is able to bypass that person who maybe can see through whatever angle he is flogging for his free agent and, you know, appeal to the sensibilities of someone who is more susceptible to that argument. And maybe the same skill would help him in these negotiations. I don't know. I mean, he'd be dealing with a lawyer on the other side who's presumably just as sharp as he is, but he could also play the media game and try to appeal to the owners who are in effect the boss of the lawyer that he's dealing with. So he could sort of try the same gambit that seems to work for him every off season. So it seems like a lot of the skills that make him good at agenting would make him good at essentially being an agent for all players at

the same time. But right, we don't know enough about the specifics of the negotiation to say whether there's something about Boris that would backfire. In principle, it's an interesting idea. I would guess, here's what I would say. I would say that I would not necessarily expect him to be the best person to do this the first time. However, if he spent a couple of decades doing it, I would imagine that he would be just as good at it as he currently is at doing what he does. He would make the terrain his,

he would get familiar with the terrain, but there might be a learning curve that I would feel a little hesitant to gamble on. And presumably, if he were really good at this job, he would hurt himself as an agent in the future, maybe, because if he is the guy who can extract the most money out of owners, or he can get more money than the other agents can get, then in a sense, he might be reducing his competitive advantage if he were to go back to just being a super agent. Wait, but aren't his incentives perfectly aligned though? He wants to get more money for the players so that as an agent he can then get more of that money, right?

But is it possible that he could get the players such a good deal that any old agent could get them plenty of money after these negotiations are completed and that no one needs to hire Scott anymore because he has done such a great job with the CBA that players are just rolling in money and there's no difference between Scott Boris, the agent, and other agents. That seems unlikely to me. Okay. All right. Tom says, with MLB teams hiring guys away from websites for a while now, I was wondering,

has there ever been an instance where a researcher found out a piece of information about a certain team or player and then leveraged that piece of information with the team before publishing? If not, can you envision a scenario where this could happen? Wait, what is the question? Give me an example, a hypothetical example. I guess the hypothetical advantage would be that, you know, I don't know, like Mike Fast or someone does the framing research and finds out about it before he publishes. And then he goes to a team. And by the way, he obviously didn't do this. This is purely a hypothetical, but he would go to a team and say, well, I've found a, something of value. Would you as a corporation like to hire me because I would bring this thing of value with me. That's how lots of things work, right?

Yeah. This is to my knowledge, not how it has generally worked with people who are hired from BP or wherever on the internet. It's, it's generally just that they're doing good work and a team gets in touch with them and says, we like the work you're doing and we want to have it all yourselves. And that's that. But obviously in the past, particularly when it was rare for teams to have these sort of analysts, people would send pamphlets or whatever they would, or, you know, even now, if you're interviewing at the winter meetings with a team or something, and you're not someone who's on the internet, you might prepare some sort of information about that team and say, I can save you this many runs and wins by doing this thing about your team.

And that definitely happened in the past. Stat people would get hired just by like sending, you know, information pamphlets to teams and saying, I've done this analysis and here's what you're overlooking about your team. And so that sort of thing definitely happened. And in the internet hiring era, I'm not aware of it happening so explicitly like this. happening so explicitly like this. But, but yeah, I mean, a lot of times, an analyst will publish some really interesting research, whether it's Mike Fast framing stuff, or Josh Kalk, who works for the Rays did some injury prediction stuff using pitch effects at the hardball times, and then got hired almost immediately after that. And so that sort of thing happens. But I wonder how many things do you think have been published by people who were, you know, later hired or by not people who were later hired, but that were published that a team regrets was published and wishes that they could have gotten

that exclusive. Like, like, for instance, I think it will go, the Mike Fast example is the best example. I could imagine that teams wish that they had had an extra year or two head start on the rest of the league when it comes to framing. Now, I don't know whether it would have given them that year or two. I don't know how close everybody else was to getting to this point anyway. And like, I'm not, when I say I don't know, I mean, like, literally, I don't know whether this was a thing where Mike Fast's work was exceptionally valuable for bringing it to the public, or if it was exceptionally valuable, because without it, the industry wouldn't have discovered it for a few years. Still, if it's the latter, then you could see a team going, doggone it. I wish he had leveraged that.

I wish we had hired him. We would have loved to have hired him and gotten exclusivity on that. But in that scenario, let's say that, let's say that that would have happened, that there are teams that wish they'd hired him before it was ever published so that they could have kept a monopoly on that information. I wonder how many, uh, things, how many examples of that there really are where teams would have put great value because it's most things that appear in public. They're they're fair. They're incremental. They are maybe they're they're revelations that would have generally been revealed fairly soon after or already were known in some front offices or could have been.

fairly soon after or already were known in some front offices or could have been. And the value of them is fairly small. As we talk about all the time, fairly small value is of great value when you're looking at $7.5 million a win. But definitely, I think that if the A's could have gotten the dips research before it was known, they would have loved that, that would have given them a couple of years probably. So that seems like a clear one. Mike Fass, we'll call that one a clear one. Do you think there are, in addition to those two, do you think there are 10 other articles where a team would have paid big to keep them to themselves? A thousand such articles, one such article? There should be probably 10 because given what teams pay analysts, I mean, some of them are paid well, but if you're just an entry level statistical analyst, you might be making a

very modest salary. And so if you're going to use that insight to make a single move that might help you, it's probably worth just hiring the person so that you have that to yourself. I mean, I was with the Yankees. I wrote about this at Grantland last year about how I happened to start interning for the Yankees right around the time they figured out framing. And that was years before Mike Fast. And I and a couple of my co-workers were keeping close tabs on how much progress the internet was making. And like Dan Turkentoff did some early, early analysis on catcher framing. and that was like right around that time that was years before mike fast and no one said we have to go hire dan turkentoff right now to keep him quiet

eventually the rays hired him but that was years later and now he's the director of the r&d department for the brewers but again that was that was years later. Reading that at the time, it was like, oh, no, I hope this guy doesn't figure it out. But there was never even the possibility that, oh, we'll just hire him. And then he won't be able to figure it out. No one even brought up that possibility. So it just didn't seem like any way you know it which is weird because if you think it's a big advantage potentially for you and it could have been then why wouldn't you try to do that but it just didn't even come up wasn't even mentioned so i don't know whether that would be the case with other teams also but yeah i mean you would you would think there there'd be 10 things or

something i mean even if it's just like uh Lichman doing UZR or something, which was a big step forward with defense or whatever. I mean, I think there's a lot of useful stuff that's been done on the internet that many teams at least didn't know about when it was published. And often you can kind of tell that someone is working on this stuff before they publish their big piece. I mean, the dips and babbips stuff was being discussed on message boards and rec sports baseball and that kind of community

before the article was actually published at Baseball Perspectives. So if a team had been keeping close tabs on those thinkers at the time, then it would have hired a bunch of them. But if teams were that smart, then they would have hired all the people who ended up writing for Baseball Perspectives even before they ended up writing for Baseball Perspectives. So I think teams just probably can't be bothered to monitor this that closely, or they dismiss the possibility that people will beat them to things. And yet they put such a huge premium on keeping all this stuff secret

once they have somebody, to the point that it seems like they way overvalue it. They think that everybody is way more interested in what they're doing than they probably would be. I keep thinking in this conversation about the piece that Nate Silver wrote long ago about kind of the how would you put this? You know, the ground ball hitters against fly ball pitchers and fly ball pitchers and fly ball hitters against ground ball pitchers and that sort of thing. Where if you are a certain type of hitter, Ben, how would you put it? There's a batted ball platoon advantage. There you go. Thank you.

Which is smaller than the lefty-righty platoon advantage, but it still exists and is meaningful. Yeah. And that was kind of rediscovered years later when Andrew Koo discovered that the A's seemed to be using it, that they seem to have either revived this notion or discovered it anew on their own. And it seemed to be, at least for a period of time, perhaps influencing their personnel choices and that it was successful for them. And that just hung out for like eight years, completely unacknowledged, unacted on. And it's not like it was hidden anywhere. It was written by Nate Silver at Baseball Perspectives during Baseball Perspectives' kind of explosion in exposure.

And despite this, there was essentially no attempt to or no league-wide recognition of it so and that's not an insignificant finding that wasn't an insignificant finding at all it turned out to I think be quite significant so just because something gets out also doesn't mean that it's going to get out yeah I think if you went to a team and, you know, you had the kind of prestige to get in front of the team, like they don't think of you as a crank or a kook. But if you went to a team and really like whispered and said, I've got the good stuff here, you know, like then they, I bet you could tempt them into overreacting and thinking we've got to keep this secret because there is something that

is just incredibly seductive about thinking that you have secret information. Like there's almost nothing more inviting than being involved in a secret. Uh, and so my guess is that, yeah, uh, Mike could have leveraged that, uh, information, uh, probably beforehand, maybe, uh, at least in the right conversation. Um, and, uh, I honestly, frankly would, uh, would recommend it. If you have that information, please do that. Yeah. Well, it's like we were talking about with Darren Willman last Friday, how often the people who end up producing this research have this impulse to share it and to be part of the community and to make other people smarter. And so maybe the

people who end up doing this, at least on the internet, I mean, there are many people you've never heard of and I've never heard of who have done brilliant analysis and we've never heard of them because they didn't just give it away for free. They went and sold it to someone. Like the article I wrote last year about AVM systems, the people from Moneyball that Paul DiPodesta was using for a while. And they had information that they thought would give everyone an advantage. And they had exclusivity deals with teams because teams wanted to keep their stuff private. So maybe it's just that people who end up writing on the internet are not the secretive type. They are the people who wrote on the internet

because they wanted to share it with a wider audience. And so the teams had to come to them to get them to keep quiet. All right, Playindex? Sure. So I was reading an old annual from like 2004 uh the other day and uh it made mention of a player's empty batting average and i always loved this idea of the empty batting average which um baseball prospectus uh authors uh used to cite quite regularly probably still do uh batting average that um you know looks okay or looks good or looks great, but it has no walks or power

or anything else to strengthen it. And so the player might hit 300, but without contributing much in the way of offense. So I wondered who has the emptiest batting average. And so what I did is I went to the play index going back to 1988. I set my plate appearances at half of a qualifying season. So at least 251 plate appearances in a season. And I set it, I set the search for anybody who's on base percentage was, I think, less than, I forget, like 5% higher than their batting average, I think. And then I did a second one for players whose slugging percentage was, I think, less than 10% higher than their batting average.

So if you were a 300 hitter, then your on-base percentage would have to be below, you know, like 315, and your slugging percentage would have to be below like 330, something like that. know like 315 and your slugging percentage would have to be below like 330 something like that and i set both of these to be uh the uh 0.5 percentile so basically uh the the lowest half percent of all player seasons in that time and um so of those uh there were you know about 45 players each um and i would look to see if anybody was on both of them there were about 45 players each. And I looked to see if anybody was on both of them. There were two players on both of them, but not the same season.

Ray Sanchez was on each of them, but different seasons. Felix Firmin was on both of them, but also different seasons. And at this point, I started rooting pretty hard for felix for mean to win this there's going to be another step because i didn't find a season that could qualify but i started rooting pretty hard for felix for mean because felix for mean uh in one of his years that he was on this list uh he sacrificed bunted 32 times as well which which seems like, A, an incredible number of sacrifice bunts. But B, I also would love it if you had a batting average, not just such an empty batting average, but empty black ink. He has black ink for this season on his offensive line. But in fact, it was all sacrifice bunts. And so I'm hoping that he will win, but I've got to raise the standards. By the way, Felix Vermeen,

we'll do a sub play index here, 32 is an insane number of sacrifice punts, and it's actually the most in the American League in a season in the modern era, but it is not the most in the majors. In fact, the champion of the sacrifice punt appears to be Jay Bell, who had 30, I think 31 year and 39 one year. He sacrificed bunted 39 times in one year, which is so many sacrifice bunts.

And so I looked at all of those sacrifice bunts using the play index and to try to find the most absurd ones. And I will say, first of all, that all of these came with none out. So it's not like he was sacrifice bunting with one out. I think if you start sacrifice bunting with one out, then you're really into, you're over the edge. But these are all with none out. And they actually all are basically plausible sacrifice bunt situations. A lot of tie games, down by one, ahead by one.

The worst probably is, I would say the worst example of a sacrifice bunt was on August 20th of 1990 when with John Cangellosi on second and nobody out. Jay Bell bunted him to third, up by four in the fifth inning, which feels like a weird time to bunt. It does. You know, we're up by four. It's the fifth inning. We really need to get that guy to third.

It feels odd to me. And that's the most extreme otherwise otherwise it's amazing how many sacrifice bunt possibilities come up if you're a sacrifice bunter as jay bell apparently was anyway i started raising the thresholds a little bit so i then bumped it up to uh the bottom 1.5 percent of seasons for each of these so now we're at like uh 20 higher than batting yards for slugging and like uh 10 for on base percentage uh and now i've got a bunch of guys who are on both with the same season uh five in fact ray sanchez who uh appears on one of these lists a total of eight times, but on both of them only once in 2001. Alex Sanchez, who has the same last name as Ray Sanchez.

Yes. Ben Revere. Felix Fermin in his great, not in his sacrifice bunt season though, in a different season. And Alvaro Espinoza. his sacrifice bunt season though in a different season and alvaro espinoza so i started uh well i started walking it back and both of the sanchez's get knocked out and the other three are all pretty close i think that uh the champion appears to be uh espinoza who i got down to i think his season was his obp was it was like uh seven percent higher than his average and slugging percentage was 17 sorry 17 and eight percent and the others

can't match that but i also they're all so close that i feel like we could use qualitative measures to decide who's uh really the best example here. Ben Revere has the best batting average of the three. He had a genuinely very good batting average. He hit like three, three or something, three something. But Ben Revere also stole a ton of bases that year. This was 2014. And by the way, the funny thing is that what knocks Ben Revere out

where he can't go any further to match Espinosa was that he had too much power. He had too much power. Ben Revere had too much power that year. The on-base percentage matched him, matched Espinosa, but he had too much power. But Ben Revere also stole 49 bases and was only caught eight times. He was, in fact, a plus nine base runner that year, which is elite. And so I'm knocking out Ben Revere. That is okay. So that leaves for me and Espinoza.

And I think you just have to go with Espinoza for a few reasons. One is that Espinoza was never, ever that good again, like even this bad, like we're talking about a player who's really bad, but he also was never that good again. He never had a batting average that high or anything like that. He also was not fast. He only stole three bases, and he was caught three times, and he's simply lower across the board than Firmino is. Espinoza ranked 39th out of 126 qualifying players.

He also, by the way, had a full qualifying season, which helps. He was 39th in the majors in batting average that year out of 126, but he was 120th in total offense. He was just an awful hitter. He hit 282, 301.332 with no home runs, and he actually strangely struck out a fair amount of time compared to the others two. So sorry that this is coming as kind of an anticlimactic conclusion

to the play index, but Alvaro Espinoza in 1989 had the emptiest batting average, the emptiest 282 batting average in history. All right. That makes perfect sense. He only was hit one time. He also sacrificed bunted 23 times. He also grounded into a lot of double plays. I took that into consideration.

He also was intentionally walked once. Huh. Wow. All right. Well, those were days when people threw more intentional walks. Like for me, for me, never struck out. So at least he had a signature skill. I mean, this guy never, he struck out fewer times in his career. He had a 10 year career and he struck out

fewer times in his career than probably 30 guys last year. He struck out 147 times all of last year. So he was doing something. Espinoza was not. Espinoza just kind of managed to do a thing. I'm going to look up his intentional walk. It was in the AL, so you can't even blame it on the pitcher thing. So Alvaro Espinoza was intentionally walked by, oh my gosh, Ben. Ben. Yes.

He was intentionally walked by Roger Clemens. No. Who was batting behind him? Oh, golly. I'm looking. By Roger Clemens in 1989. It looks like a pinch hitter was batting behind him. And Ken Phelps batting.

Yeah, was in the on-deck circle. Wow. Ken Phelps. Because Ken Phelps, the other thing is that, no, and they left Clemens in to face Phelps, who was a left-handed hitter. So you didn't even have a platoon advantage here. Espinoza was a right-handed hitter. Clemens, of course, is a right-handed pitcher.

They intentionally walked him. Wayne Tolleson was on deck. And I guess... And Tolleson was a switch hitter. Now, Tolleson was very bad. He was horrible. But he was also a switch hitter. So you knew that they were at least going to have a lefty possibility. but then they, you had to know that Phelps was going to pinch hit

and Phelps was a heck of a hitter. Phelps, Phelps at that point was coming on. It was at the tail end of a five-year run in which he had 145 OPS plus. Now, of course the situation dictated it. There were runners on second and third with two outs, though. With two outs. Well. Why would they do that? I could see if there was nobody out. It was a 5-4 game.

Clemens was already trailing. So I could see if Clemens had a one-run lead as opposed to trailing by one. And I could see if there was nobody out or one out and you wanted to set up the double play maybe talking yourself into it but to do that with two outs is incredible maybe they just figured hitting at the time was he was hitting 350 or something uh the date of this was august 21st and of course as've noted, he was a batting average guy. He was hitting two nine. He was hitting two 91 and a single scores in both. So it doesn't really matter how bad he is as a hitter at that point.

If he's a, if you think he's a two 91 hitter empty or not two 91, it's a good batting average and a single scores in both all the same though. That's bananas. And, uh, Clemens, uh,

faced Ken Phelps and walked a run-in so uh and then he was relieved for lee smith and now neither one of those guys phelps or smith is in the hall of fame because of that huh manager of that team was joe morgan but oh not not that not that joe morgan the other joe mor The other Joe Morgan. For just a second. For just a second. Would have been the perfect ending to that anecdote, but sadly, different Joe Morgan. Wow. All right.

I had a very quick play index from Quinn who said, in 1976, Mark Fidrich compiled 9.6 war, that's baseball reference war, while only striking out 97 batters. Is this the single greatest strikeout to war deficit of the live ball era? I'm assuming the 24 complete games played a role in the high war. So what I just did was I looked at all the nine war seasons, and those are like all-time great seasons. There are only 51 nine war seasons since 1920. And of all of those, I looked for the players' strikeout rate compared to the league average strikeout rate or the MLB average strikeout rate in the same year. And of those 51

nine war seasons, there were only two in which the pitcher had a strikeout rate below the MLB average that year. And Mark Fidrich was the guy who was furthest below the league average. His strikeout rate was only 9.7% in a league that struck out 12.7% of batters. in a league that struck out 12.7% of batters. So he was only 77% of the league average strikeout rate in that year. And yet he had 9.6 war Wilbur wood, the knuckleballer a few years earlier is the only other pitcher in that club who had a below league average strikeout rate. So yeah, Mark Fidrich just, uh, threw a ton of innings and didn't allow a lot of runs so that's how you do it without striking people out and uh there are some if you expand the the club to you know drop it down to seven war or eight war seasons then you start getting more of these, but Mark Friedrich is an outlier in that

group of outlier seasons. All right, I'll just do one more from Chris, who says, when describing park effects, you often note that they may not be constant over time, and instead it is possible that a park becomes more or less extreme. While I can understand how this happens when the park dimension is modified, like moving the outfield walls at city field, I am struggling to see how and why this would happen in other instances. Is this just statistical noise, temporary factors that are unlikely to be predictive in the long term, like if it's a warmer than average summer in a city, maybe it will play more hitter friendly that year, or do parks truly become more or less hitter friendly over time? And I think the answer to this is that it is often just statistical noise. And that's why people use at least three years

often for park factors. And even that can maybe be a little bit deceptive, but there are actual things. And he's right, it could just be a weird weather year. But there are things other than fences that could affect it. It could be the wind patterns in the stadium, if they put up a new scoreboard, and that changes the way the wind swirls in there. Or even if, you even if someone puts up a big building next to the ballpark or something, and that changes the wind patterns. Teams will often do wind pattern studies before they make some sort of structural change like this, or could be a change to the playing surface, or there could be a change to the batter's eye, something like that. So there are actual things, but if it's something like that, where

the effect probably wouldn't be as dramatic as lowering the fences or moving them far in, then you'd probably have a hard time distinguishing between noise and real effect for a few years. But there are things that can affect it. Ken Phelps, since 1970, is the 71st best hitter against right-handed pitching in all of baseball. Over the last almost 50 years. He's sandwiched in between Eddie Murray and Reggie Jackson by OPS. That's the guy they wanted to face. That is a weird one. So the 1988 Red Sox, Joe Morgan, that Joe Morgan took over as interim manager and the team immediately went on a huge

winning streak, including a 20 game home winning streak at Fenway Park. The win streak, along with Joe's likable local persona, made for quick celebrity. And the team's turnaround was known as Morgan's magic. But the year after, he didn't have as much success, maybe because he was intentionally walking Alvaro Espinosa to face Ken Phelps with Roger Clemens. All right, so that's it for today. You can send us more emails for next week at podcast at baseball perspectives.com and join our facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectively wild and you can rate and review and subscribe to the podcast on itunes support the sponsor which we used for much of

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